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San Francisco’s waterfront freeway was removed 25 years ago. No one misses it

Removal didn’t generate dramatic increases in traffic, but completion of new grade-level boulevard had other dramatic – positive – effects

Twenty-five years after The Embarcadero Freeway was torn down on San Francisco's waterfront, the city's restored Ferry Building is a bustling food market, crowded with tourists, Edward Keenan writes. (Jason Doiy / Istock)

Years of study — and even more years of debate — about the fate of the Gardiner Expressway’s eastern portion will end next week when city council decides what to do with the iconic piece of road at its meeting beginning June 10. As the arguments reach their climax, Edward Keenan looks at the options, the experience of other cities, and what either choice might mean for a new neighbourhood in the east end of downtown.

SAN FRANCISCO—Standing next to the historic Ferry Building on The Embarcadero boulevard along San Francisco Bay, Dave Osgood recalls when his father brought him here as a boy. Once upon a time, this had been the second-busiest transit passenger terminal in the world, the hub of a bustling waterfront port district next to downtown. By then, it was virtually abandoned, but his father wanted to give him the historic tour.

“It was pretty much deserted. There was one little window open on the side of the building, where some state employees picked up their pay packets, or something. My father told him why he’d brought me down, and the guy just said, ‘Take him somewhere else. There’s nothing down here anymore.’ ”

What had changed was that in the 1960s, an elevated double-decker expressway had been built over the road, carrying commuters from Oakland coming across the Bay Bridge into downtown and Chinatown. By the 1970s they were merely standing under a highway, a pedestrian wasteland of boarded-up buildings and parking lots populated almost exclusively by homeless squatters.

Just a quarter century ago, a two-level highway ran parallel to the historic ferry building in San Francisco. After the 1989 earthquake, The Embarcadero became a grand waterfront boulevard.

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It’s difficult to imagine that scene now, standing here.

Today, the restored Ferry Building is a bustling artisanal food market, crowded on a weekday with tourists, joggers and lunching businesspeople sipping fancy coffee and gazing out at the hills across the water. And The Embarcadero is a grand avenue, lined with palm trees and parkland. Old streetcars (including one painted maroon and yellow and bearing TTC logos) run in a right-of-way beside six lanes of car traffic and green bike lanes. Broad sidewalk promenades host historical markers between restaurant patios running through some of the fastest-growing neighbourhoods of the city.

The highway is long gone, and I cannot find anyone who misses it.

In fact, while I am in San Francisco in mid-May, news reports say Mayor Ed Lee is preparing a proposal to tear down another elevated expressway because of the success of the removal of The Embarcadero Freeway and the Central Freeway 25 years ago. Osgood, my guide and a local neighbourhood activist who in the past served as vice-chair of the city’s neighbourhood advisory committee, tells me that the new proposal is likely to be very controversial. The inland freeway doesn’t bother people as much as the one here that once cut off the waterfront.

Of course, once upon a time, the idea of tearing down The Embarcadero Freeway was controversial, too. So much so that in 1986, voters worried about traffic implications decided in a referendum not to tear the highway down. But then the major Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 tore it down anyway.

A 2012 report called “The Life and Death of Urban Highways,” by two transportation think-tanks, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and EMBARQ, tells what happened after the earthquake made the highway impassable.

“There was a temporary increase in traffic congestion. Soon thereafter, many drivers switched to transit … and the local street grid absorbed a large portion of the remaining traffic. Once skeptics saw that the city was not gridlocked without the freeway, it was easier to build support for the proposed boulevard.”

While the removal of the highway didn’t generate dramatic increases in traffic, the completion of the new grade-level boulevard did have other dramatic effects. Property values increased by 300 per cent, according to the report, and development explosion is still reverberating.

Osgood, who now lives in a mixed-use apartment building in the Rincon Hill neighbourhood on the route of the former highway, shows me the grand headquarters of The Gap, constructed in the exact spot where the road used to curve onto the waterfront. Thousands of new condo units have been or are being built along the route south of Market St., along with millions of square feet of offices and hundreds of thousands of feet of retail space. More than 20 cranes remain visible on construction sites along the route today.

Up on Folsom St., where construction is bustling on the old route, a 27-year-old police officer told me she’d never heard of the freeway I was asking about. A grey-haired man in a hard hat and construction vest standing with her seemed puzzled when I suggested we were standing right where the overpasses once ran. It’s just boom town now.

From the close-up perspective of a local activist, Osgood doesn’t gloss over the cautionary lessons of the development boom: he spends a lot of time outlining missed opportunities where prime pieces of public land are handed over to developers with friends at city hall, where local zoning laws are disregarded, where transit users have been shortchanged. He advises that any massive redevelopment needs to be handled carefully to avoid corruption and opportunity costs from ad hoc project planning.

But when I ask him if there’s still any debate — among commuters, say, or talk radio callers — about rebuilding the freeway, or at least people insisting it was a mistake to remove it, he seems momentarily stunned.

People didn’t want to take it down. But once it was gone and they saw the alternative, the highway became a rapidly fading memory. The thought of rebuilding it on The Embarcadero now seems absurd — simply unthinkable.

Next: The Chicago model

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA: Cheonggyechon Expressway

The four-lane elevated expressway carried an estimated 1.5 million vehicles per day before it was shut down in 2003. The new “greenway” that replaced it resurfaced a buried river and construction of parkland around it. Vehicle traffic into downtown actually decreased after the expressway was removed as transit use went up, and cars around the city actually travelled faster. The mayor who made removing the expressway and restoring the river his legacy went on to be elected president of South Korea.

SOURCES: “The Life and Death of Urban Highways,” ITDP & EMBARQ; “Case Studies in Urban Freeway Removal,” city of Seattle government

The four-lane elevated expressway carried an estimated 1.5 million vehicles per day before it was shut down in 2003. (Shoenberg3/Dreamstime)

PORTLAND, OREGON: Harbour Dr.

In the late 1960s, a waterfront expressway was removed in favour of a 37-acre park. Since its removal, property values in the waterfront urban renewal area have increased more than 10 per cent per year, while traffic volume has decreased almost 10 per cent in the area.

SOURCE: “The Life and Death of Urban Highways,” ITDP & EMBARQ

In the late 1960s, a waterfront expressway was removed in favour of a 37-acre park. (RyanJLane/Istock)

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN: Park East Freeway

Originally planned as part of a larger highway network that was never competed, the 1.5-kilometre Park East Freeway spur on the waterfront was underused when the city decided to remove it in 2002 and replace it with a surface boulevard. In the five years immediately after its removal, land values in the area increased 180 per cent.

SOURCE: “The Life and Death of Urban Highways,” ITDP & EMBARQ

In the five years immediately after the removal of the Park East Freeway, land values in the area increased 180 per cent. (David Liu/Istock)

PARIS, FRANCE: Pompidou Expressway

The two-lane expressway along the banks of the Siene River carried roughly 70,000 cars per day into and out of the centre of the city. Beginning in 2002, the city began closing the road during summer months to set up a “Paris Plage” (or “beach”) filled with pedestrian and seating areas, sand, and refreshments stalls. Millions of visitors came on foot, without significant traffic problems in the area. In 2012, Paris began to permanently covert the expressway into 37 acres of parkland, a process that will take most of a decade to complete.

The six-lane elevated highway along the Hudson River carried 140,000 cars per day until it collapsed in the 1970s and was permanently closed. As the ruin of the road was removed in stages over a period of years, the city noted that more than half of the traffic that had used the road seemed simply to have disappeared. Much of the former highway land has been developed as parkland, including the 550-acte Hudson River Park, the largest park built in New York City since Central Park.

The six-lane elevated highway along the Hudson River carried 140,000 cars per day until it collapsed in the 1970s and was permanently closed. (Sarah Ackerman)

The hybrid option

THE PLAN: Remove the easternmost stretch of the road beyond the Don River, rebuild the rest in its current alignment to the Don Valley Parkway, adding new off-ramps at Cherry St.

LONG-TERM COST: $919 million

TRAFFIC IMPACTS: Add three minutes to current status-quo travel times to Union Station from Victoria Park and Kingston Rd., keep travel times the same for most other starting points.

DEVELOPMENT IMPACTS: Opens up former Unilever site for large planned development, limits options near Cherry St. and the Keating Channel where new off-ramps will go.

Source: City of Toronto staff reports

The removal option

THE PLAN: Removes the elevated highway east of Jarvis St., replacing it with an eight-lane boulevard.

LONG-TERM COST: $461 million

TRAFFIC IMPACTS: Add five minutes to current status-quo travel times to Union Station from Victoria Park and Kingston Rd., add three minutes to trips from Etobicoke, Don Mills, and North Scarborough.

DEVELOPMENT IMPACTS: Opens up former Unilever site for large planned development, also unlocks $150 million in city land from former right-of-ways and ramps, creates more options for “public realm” improvements in waterfront redevelopment.

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